"Your parents died like heroes," I recalled the Dark Matter Manipulator veteran telling me when I was ten. It was an unprecedented visit to our house, and I thought I might have been going to Titan, but instead, it was bad news.

  "Your parents were some of the greatest Manipulatars around. Young… happy. Thrilled that their newborn son was thriving on Titan. Until their house got attacked. The Dark Lord himself came and blew the house apart with Dark Matter. You should feel lucky your mom had gotten some type of advanced warning, or you would be dead right now. She hid you in a chamber under the ice that covers Titan, which nobody knew about until after the fact. She sacrificed herself as a distraction against the Dark Lord. So did your father. I am sorry I have to tell you this."

  That was the last of my flashbacks before I came back to the realm of consciousness. I always hated this dream of the Manipulator coming and telling me of how my parents died, but it never seemed to go away.

  When I came to, I was lying in my cot that was shoved away in a walk-in closet. The adjoining room was supposed to be my room, but as soon as the Earth Guard came to my aunt and uncle's doorstep, saying that they got a new house according to the law because of their adopted child, I was put in the smallest room available.

  Right now, my room was being used as a fancy dining room so that my aunt and uncle's friends could come over and get drunk, having the time of their lives.

  "Get up, Wyatt!" my aunt, Elisha, yelled at me from the other room. I heaved my sore body up from my bed. Everything seemed to hurt from the fight the night before.

  It was times like this that I wished the admin at Titan would welcome me to the Academy. I would sit many mornings on my birthday waiting in bed for someone to knock on the door and say they were taking me away to the moon, Titan.

  That name always sent shivers of excitement down my back. Titan was where humans first discovered how to harness Dark Matter hundreds of years ago, when a large deposit of the stuff was found in the very heart of Titan.

  I'd always dreamed of flying through the atmosphere of Titan on my wings made of Dark Matter.

  "Get out of bed!" my aunt pounded on the door. I threw on my clothes and dragged my feet out the door, not quite ready to face the day ahead.

  "What do you want, toadface?" I said to my aunt, ticked at being pulled out of bed this early in the morning.

  "Don't call me a toadface," Elisha said, slapping me across the face. I took it without a word. Sometimes when I ragebated her like that, I felt like I deserved it anyway.

  "Get to work," she told me, and I started working on all the household chores that made me late to school each day.

  I picked up the broken glass off the floor from the party the night before, made my uncle Josh his bacon for the morning, and scrubbed everything in between.

  After I was done with my morning torture, I scrambled out the door, where I would then run in the hundred-degree heat to the hell that school was to me.

  As I ran under the sky that wasn't really a sky, just a large screen that was supposed to replicate what the surface looked like ten thousand years ago, I struggled to breathe in the air that was hardly even air. Oxygen generators were struggling to keep up, resulting in the 'outside' air having dangerously low Oxygen levels.

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  In reality, though, everyone with brain cells knew that we lived deep underground to avoid the wasteland above us. We, humans, had done this because it was cheaper than setting up vast complexes aboveground.

  Although I did hear rumours from time to time from my classmates that a few people had had the enormous wealth to live above ground.

  At the end of the day, however, none of this would be revealed unless I got off of this forsaken planet. Still, I had a math test today, so I might as well try to pass it. In reality, I probably wasn't going to get away from here, so I might as well try to do well in school. Who knew? Maybe I could get into a university.

  So, as I pulled up to school, I resolved to pass my math test. The problem was: I sucked at math.

  That was the last of my worries as I walked up the stairs to school. My friend Leo was waiting at the top of the stairs for me, and we dabbed each other up.

  "How's your research on Dark Matter going?" he asked me.

  "Pretty good," I said. This was actually the reason I had been in the library yesterday when I got beaten up: I had been researching Dark Matter, one of my favorite things to do in my pastimes.

  "Cool," Leo said and then hurried to his first class.

  I opened the doors to the school and immediately saw one of my nemesis, as I liked to think about them. This one's name was Jerry, and he was a big, fat, dumb kid who liked to give me random punches for fun.

  Today, I saw he was in an especially sour mood for some reason and made eye contact with me. Whoops, I had been trying to make it without being noticed.

  "What do you think you're doing?" he sneered. I shrugged my shoulders and kept trying to walk past, but he stopped me, putting his meaty fists on my shoulders.

  "If anyone asks who did it, it was you." Then it all happened so fast. The bully yoinked his own pants down, and the lights went out soon after that for me with a fist to my skull. The last thing I heard was,

  "Wyatt pulled down my pants!"

  I came to the principal's office. Our principal was big and was super mean to some people, with eyes that seemed to bulge out of her sockets.

  "Why do you have to do these things?" she told me sympathetically. I was in her office way too often because of my 'inappropriate behavior,' and she knew a lot about me, including my dream to go to Titan.

  "Every time you come in here, it's because you've done something stupid. You always instigate people one way or another. Wyatt, I really don't know when you'll stop, but if you don't, life is going to suck."

  I nodded my head at her. I'd gotten this speech one too many times, and I knew that if I tried to say anything else, the bullies would do much worse to me outside of school. It was what she said after that that caught my attention.

  "You will never go to Titan if you keep this up," she told me. "They don't like people who don't work well with other people." I looked at her, trying to argue, but she cut me off. "It's just part of life, Wyatt."

  She waved me out of her office, and I left feeling depressed. Why did this always have to be me?

  Next time, this isn’t going to happen, I told myself firmly. Your future depends on it.

  "Hey," a voice jolted me out of my thoughts. I looked up to see Harper, a pretty girl with stunning green eyes and blonde hair.

  "Hey," I said. I had talked with Harper from time to time, but we'd never really been friends, even though I felt we could be. I guess that's what happens when you are this low on the popularity scale, right?

  "I saw that prank you played on Leo," she smiled. "It was awesome."

  "Thanks," I said, not bothering to correct her. "Why are you here?"

  "Hmmm?" she said. "I got called up about Titan."

  Something dinged on her flesh-watch, something only the rich could afford, and she went into the office.

  I smiled wistfully at her. Of course, the rich kid got to go to Titan. That watch that she had been wearing had not been cheap. Not that I would ever get a flesh-watch anyway. They were expensive to put into your skin, and my adopted parents would never pay for them.

  So for the rest of the day, I sat through class thinking about what it would be like to communicate with your thoughts through a flesh-watch.